Lightning extends his tangerine- and lime-coloured wings. The grass under his wingtips trembles into a fleeting filigree of sparks. Ruxandra climbs on his back and breathes azure as Lightning soars, southbound.

They fly for a long time, the sun shifting above them, lakes and streams scintillating below them. Ruxandra’s eyes follow the effulgent water ribbons, all in pursuit of a grand lake engulfing the horizon, more expansive than anything she’s ever seen. At the end—or the beginning?—of one such ribbon shines a waterfall, nestled among a patch of sandstone cliffs. Nearby, a dazzling golden dragon awaits, wings unfurled.

The Dragon of the Setting Sun is flying in from the west, bringing two other young dragons. As Lightning and Setting Sun touch the ground, they greet one another and the golden dragon.
“Welcome back, Murgatroyd.”

The golden one radiates joy. “It’s good to see you again, Lightning, Setting Sun. And meet you all—you must be Ruxandra, Smaranda, and Sabin.” Murgatroyd smiles.
Ruxandra’s eyes blink wide. “You’ve been travelling with the Dragon of Echo! What did you learn from them?”
Murgatroyd smiles. “They showed me the power of resonance and how far it reaches, even beyond sound.”

Days fly by as if still on the wings of Lightning. For now, the dragon school means walks through forests that resound with birdsong, lion roars, and snake hisses. Even the mosses rumble here, Murgatroyd tells them, the thrumming of life is everywhere, and dragons made it all. Someday, she says, the three young dragons will find their own powers and add them to this effervescence of the elements.

When mentor and mentees return from forest walks, retreating into the tranquility of a stalactite-adorned cave, Smaranda breathes crimson fire, just like her scales, and Sabin is settling into lavender hues.

Yet, Ruxandra’s flames are undecided. One rainy evening, she sneaks out from the comfort of the cave into the thunder of the waterfall, trying to listen to the shrubs and ferns that sought their home on cliffs. She sighs at times, but the rain tramples her indigo breath-wisps. Soon after, Murgatroyd’s golden light finds her, throwing swift shadows and just as quickly chasing them away.
They stand in silence for heartbeat after heartbeat. As the rain subsides, Ruxandra’s voice grows clear.
“I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. I’m afraid there isn’t a single thing I can do right, Murg.”
“Everyone knows and can do something, Rux. There’s no right way.”
“What if I’ll be the first who can’t do anything at all, in any way? I’ll end up nameless.”
Murgatroyd’s eyes flicker.
“No dragon has ever been nameless, except for one. But he has lost his name.”
Ruxandra shivers. “I’ve heard of The Hollow One. I don’t want to be hollow, too.”
“He had more powers than any other before him, and used them well for aeons. But he kept wanting more. He wanted them all, and built new magic meant to draw the others’. That’s why Echo banished him so he can never be seen.”
“Is that why you went to study with Echo? Because they overpowered Hollow?”
Murgatroyd hesitates to answer, if only for a moment. “Yes. We need to keep resonance alive.”

That night, she tells all the young dragons more. Every generation faces The Hollow One. He tries to prey again and again, but the reverberations that travel through the world keep him at bay.
“He will come after you. If you can listen carefully to what this world reveals—and to yourself—you will defeat him.”

Ruxandra’s words burst out in a kaleidoscope of plumes.
“What if we … can’t hear ourselves? I thought that your scales can tell you who you are, but so many dragons’ colours change … and sometimes even their fire is unpredictable.”
“Who you are is on the inside,” Murgatroyd whispers. “All of us carry the whole sky. Clouds and rain and all. That’s why we change, just like the sky.”
Smaranda’s wings flutter. “How does anyone find their own sky?”
“You can try to pick a cloud, any cloud, and see where it takes you. It might lead you into another one, into a storm, or melt into the sunlight, but it will still leave traces, crystals of song and flame.”
“Does that mean that … colour is music?” Sabin clicks his talons.
“Everything is both—and more. Just different kinds of scales… If your fire wants to be colour, you can try to sing it.”
In the silence that follows, the dragons’ minds and hearts are singing.

The hum of sunrise fills the next morning’s air, but a new whirr grows heavy. As every stalactite begins to warble, Murgatroyd listens for the unmistakable.
“The Hollow One has heard us and he’s here.”

She rushes to the entrance. The young dragons follow, scales rattling, colours at their shrillest, Smaranda’s crimson turned vermilion and Sabin’s amethyst about as bright as diamonds. Ruxandra’s shifting to metallic ruby. Wrath. A shade of fear. A minor scale. Her voice, distinct, inside and out. Note rising as she does into the sky, cloaked in scarlet fire. The sun is a red giant, but it’s on our side. It has to be.

The world is turning into—or has always been—a giant loom, and Murgatroyd begins to set aquamarine flame warps. She’s longing for what’s been, will never or forever be; everything weaved into one moment. Emerald. All connected. We can’t lose.
Thunder is roaring all around them. The cliffs now wail with ferns aquiver, wilting. Ruxandra sings a rainbow, then another, all sweeping, braiding with the others’. Call and response and call again. Joy, anguish, freedom, loneliness. All ours. We’re not hollow.

The voices of Clear Water, Lightning, Murgatroyd—steadfast, yet ever-louder. The thunder fades as dragons paint the sky.

The four are ready for their flight back to the glade. They leave the waterfall behind, until it’s long gone, way below the clouds.

Ruxandra smiles. Azure is gratitude. She flies a little closer to Murgatroyd.
“I haven’t dared to ask this of anyone. Do the other beings that share our world know that we’re making everything in it?”
“Some do know, Rux. Some do.”

(Note: Writing this for “Heavens to Murgatroyd!”, an anthology published by Lintusen Press in 2025 honouring the acclaimed Canadian poet, writer and spoken-word artist Murgatroyd Monaghan, was pure joy. Seeing my name as a contributor among those of artists I greatly admire was and remains exhilarating: Shawn L. Bird, Laurène Boutin, Finnian Burnett, Sherry Cassells, Renee Cronley, Susan Duffield-Lodge, Robyn Diner, Lindsey Harrington, Trevor Hodges, Zilla Jones, Alma Lee, Lavinia Leon, Trent Lewin, Tom McCann, Robert Runté, Donnalynn Rainey, Janet Richards, M. Gail Stelter, and T.L. Tomljanovic.)

You thought you were gazing at the end of the world, at

the infinite futures unfolding, at you being the last

and the first, and the only one to ever live aievea1, and you’re

A/bout to dream, A/bout to rhyme, A/bout to reason, to crumble\, to cry~, to be tired

to wish you had never been born\, to collapse\ then to call what you made the best of

It anyway—this stage, this geoid, this biology interlaced with physics, this

irredeemable chaos that deceives you, an ebb-flow—all-ready antiquated

It will be settled—dust always is—hush, little world

now don’t write a word

—there are no stock-photo search results for “apollinaire”—

Okay, let’s see where this extemporaneous2 exercise goes. Thirty minutes, GO.

Layer 1: I had a blue notebook and a crush.

Layer 2: The blue was dark-blue, transparent — plastic cover, in fact.

Layer 3: Only a few years before that (this before was the late-‘80s), commercially sold book/notebook covers were a bit of a hot commodity in my country of birth. More readily available was a purple, porous, thick paper that we could fold into ad-hoc covers, on which we’d stick a label. [very crafty, very grounding, eh]

Layer 4: Other precious stationery items were either obtained “under the table” (if you knew someone at the store) or a little too expensive for the average citizen of my hometown. Geometry sets in tin boxes were an example of the former. Dolls sitting for months on the same (top) shelf were very much the latter.

Layer 5: Those dolls at the store had hair and eyes that hadn’t been painted on, as it was the case with Katyusha. Katyusha’s bob hairstyle was an illusion in ochre paint, but I loved her nonetheless. She’d come from Moscow, I remember, with my aunt, who’d also brought me, from that short visit to the more acceptable “abroad”, a toy Kalashnikov.

Layer 6: If I don’t recall much more about Katyusha and her Kalashnikov, it’s because, the day after I’d turned five, my grandfather (always concerned about my wasting my time and potential playing) rounded up my toys in a plastic bag that he took to the attic.

[then a very troublesome Wall fell, my country went ahead to broadcast a revolution etc.]

Layer 7: I never went to the attic. After Grandpa’s passing, those incursions had fallen on Grandma, who herself fell off the ladder on New Year’s Eve ‘91, breaking both her legs.

Layer 8: It’s a bit of a miracle that her fractured legs ever worked again, despite the osteoporosis they’d discovered on that occasion. At that point, she’d been menopausal for over 20 years. I’ll never know if that was truly physiologic early-menopause or some consequence of a botched abortion, as many of them were between 1967 and 1989 in the Socialist Republic of Romania that had banned them. (I think that some of the societal results of that ban, Est. 1966, became a case study in Levitt’s “Freakonomics”. Heck, we even got some film awards — my partner is still reluctant to watch any Romanian New Wave after I dropped that one on him, a decade ago.) Anyway, what matters is that she survived that, as well as other things that must have turned her into who she was when I showed up. Some that I know: famine in ‘47, typhoid fever soon after that, a blow to the head the day before I was born.

Layer 9: I don’t go there often, it’s about the influence that such a woman can have on her surroundings — including me. I think I need to resurface for some air.

Layers 8-to-1, accelerated ascent3. Remember the journals that she found? Remember how she finally let you have them, after she’d extracted all the shame she could from you (in early teens by then), and how, after you burned them, grinned at you: “I made copies.”? Rhetorical, of course you do. You never found the copies, though. Wouldn’t surprise you if she bluffed to keep that upper hand. The blue notebook was safe, innocuous, just lines from friends on some special occasion like a trip abroad. (You went west, every time, but that’s another story from another life.)

“À LA FIN TU ES LAS DE CE MONDE ANCIEN.” your crush (no, never realized) wrote in that notebook. Twenty years later, you ran into his mother at the market, and learned, it seems, that he’d been sort of crushing on you too. Or something. You were both nerds. And you both read some French poetry, it seems.

This phenomenon is used a lot in medical-laboratory testing, especially for blood cells, as part of techniques such as flow cytometry.]

We’re excited to meet you, molecule blobs! Well, in the words of the lifeforms that think of themselves as the top of the food chain on this planet, you are the excitable ones, but we were already lining up right after we occurred in that argon-ion chamber enclosure that the lifeforms call “laser”. We call it Blue.

We’re everywhere and know everything, but we’re rather easily difra…ehrm, distracted. All that light you’ve seen since your atoms were born? Us. We love to meet new particles! We may wave hello differently sometimes–not now, since Blue packed each of us with a 488-nanometre kick for the road before sending us your way–but I assure you we all travel at the same pace and no one’s ever left behind!

We always have all of time in the worlds for a chat with our best friends–you! We’re guessing you’re fluorescein?

“No, I’m just an antibody. My fluorescent pal is the next molecule over.”

Ah, our bad! We don’t see fluorescein as often anymore. Sounds like we’re in an immunological-staining scenario. Flow-cytometry, perhaps?

“Indeed! Keep going and you’ll see her, she’s about four hundred times smaller than I am.”

“Hey, I’m here! No need to go further, all of us molecules are in a stream that’s moving too. Delighted to meet you, I was getting terribly bored of this ground state!”

Likewise, old-timer. We brought the energy boost that will jump-start your electrons.

“Much appreciated. Sorry I can’t repay you as coherently as Blue–I wouldn’t want you to think I’m shifty or anything, but I can offer about 37 nanometres, give or take, to some of you as thanks.”

We’ll see you on the plots and graphs the lifeforms will be drawing, Fluor! We heard that they appreciate your assistance in finding clues about their health and much more. They’ve constructed plenty of newfangled molecules that do the same you do when they stick them to an antibody, looking for cell structures and the like, but you were there since the beginning. We told you, we know everything. We’re stoked to be a part of this.

Onwards to the detector, then, brave photons! Nobody said this was going to be easy, but we shall peak…ehrm, peek at those plots and see the difference we’ve just made!

Wait...this was a “negative control” and we’ve only run into background signal? Oh, no, not the cosmic-microwave background story all over again. That event was just a little crowded.

[This piece appeared on the 2024 website of Quantum Shorts, a flash-fiction competition organized by the Centre for Quantum Technologies and National University of Singapore — I loved the excerpt that was used!]

The North Saskatchewan River flows mainly eastward 

from the Columbia Icefields in the Rocky Mountains,

                                    meandering through

                    a septentrional human settlement known most often now as Edmonton*

                                   and a placeless neuronal encampment holding memories from Romania,

before its blue, blended with others’, reaches the Hudson Bay on the Canadian Shield.  

Sometimes my bus is so quiet that I can hear my thoughts and I wonder how the first words will sound like.

Sometimes there are clouds and the river that has just freed itself from the ice prison has the same colour as dead grass. Sometimes I see the gulls congregate in empty parking lots on Saturday mornings. I always forget my bus thoughts by the time I get home, but I have this bright, comforting feeling that they’re always the same because something else I always do the same way is postpone my wandering through the spruces on the hills or in the covertly grandiose river valley that I, not unlike many others, take for granted.

I always look out the bus window, but sometimes my mind stalks inward, reaching for those books that gave me images for words and are now about to fall into the abyss of neverbeing. Yes, you see a willow, but how about The Wind in the Willows? Now tell me how that isn’t what you really see. How could I say otherwise when that thought also brings the peacefulness of the weeping willow that found its place by our porch and has now grown much taller than I am? When another story, one that’s never been translated from the original Romanian in which a wordsmith named Vladimir Colin wrote it, steps or seeps forward to remind me about a mystical walnut tree and a mysterious ruby frog, I think about how that story made me dream that our own walnut tree was charmed. It wasn’t — in fact, the year that we stood under that tree the night before St. George’s day was a very bad year or maybe I’m entirely wrong and the superstition worked and it was what kept my mother alive after that accident on a Wednesday in June—

—the same summer I ran out of books as I tried to run from seeing and knowing the immediate aftermath of having a limb severed by the wheels of a train—

—but I did know where my aunt, who owned overflowing bookshelves, hid her house key when she left for work—

—now I also know that hiding it was never her intention but she’s been gone for twenty-one years and I can only thank her in my dreams, her agony was only three weeks long and the last one of those she’d stopped talking, although she understood and I tried very hard to smile in response to her eyes asking me if I knew the truth, because I did, I’d seen the lymph node above her left collarbone and we’d just learned about stomach cancer and the meaning of that swollen node in semiology, they called it the Virchow–Troisier sign, which on its own sounds quite innocuous, doesn’t it, but no one else would tell her and it was not my place to do that, not consciously, at least, so then I did my very best or worst to convince my face to lie, since her own children had asked her doctors to give her a fake discharge note saying “sarcoidosis”, a condition supposedly much milder in comparison, and her daughter crushed tears between her teeth while rubbing her mother’s feet with some gel meant to take away a millionth of the pain, that was right before they had to go to morphine for a little while, just until it all ended, when the daughter said she felt as if her heart had been ripped out of her chest and she called the other two women in the house, but not me, not yet then ready for this rite of passage, as if we ever could be ready, to help wash and dress her mother one last time, just as I was writing her a letter I knew she’d never read asking her to please forgive me if she can in this realm or the one she was rejoining for not having gone to visit her in the hospital during the few days she’d been there to see if she has ulcer, which she did not have, but the CAT scan never found the primary tumour, it must have been smaller than the distance between slices, and they buried her in December on a Saturday and my coat caught fire from the candles, and I did go to visit my uncle, her husband, in the hospital five years later, after he’d had a stroke that convinced him I was my mother, whom he adored as if she was his daughter, and although the daughter couldn’t leave her new country at short notice to be there — so I guess the distance spared her the same kind of grief she’d already inhabited, only to give her the one of not having said farewell instead — seeing my mother in me made him so happy that he spoke and I believed he was getting better but he wasn’t and he died the next day, the day I bought my one-way plane ticket across the Atlantic to this eerily magnificent Canadian boreal prairie town where I live filled in equal measure with gratitude and wrath and sometimes I still find the thoughts that I’ll never see the dead ones again and that they ever existed equally hard to believe—

—at the same time I remember how I used to sneak inside their house to borrow books, I feel the sadness that I thought would never let me go (indeed, it never did) once I’d finished the last volume of a solar and melancholic trilogy, Ionel Teodoreanu’s La Medeleni, which I hear is being published in English next summer and I can’t wait to read that resplendent rainbow prose again under the unneeded ruse that it’s in a different language, because it’s not the language-processing headquarters it dispatches but the whole way I see and feel my way through all of this, through its characters who move in a world otherwise as frozen between the World Wars as the North Saskatchewan flowing still stilted between the phases of seemingly eternal water it carries, and in which the most beautiful and vital character, a young woman named Olga, whose hair is as black as mine, ends all that brimming life inside her with the aid of a revolver after learning she has cancer and there’s something about either the light described in the book in that scene — which I don’t know if I’ll skip this time — or the light in my room as I read it or maybe I’m wrong and it’s not either but both, something about that light, in any case, that never let me sleep around the golden hour, when even the prehistoric humans must have known that the demons crawl out of the spaces where we manage to convince them to stay during the day, and that alone is a miracle and I don’t know what we give them demons to buy their clemency for even a fragment of that time — free reign at night, perhaps—

—the same light, because individual photons don’t matter, only their collective indifference transcends the energy-matter barrier just enough for our low-grade rods to catch and interpret, passes through Bohemian crystal in a café in Vienna very much the same way it refracts through cheap glassware in an otherwise chic pastry shop in Baia-Mare, northwestern Transylvania, not far from the prison at Sighet, one of the too many places — all of them were too many, in fact — where they’d locked up the most dangerous of the disruptive, bourgeois elements called intellectuals during the odious years of Stalinization and where the poets they tortured wrote on the walls about Christ, who descended in their cell, unashamed of His wounds as we should all be of ours if we claim to believe in His example, and ennobled the long-suffering earthborn with Stigmata as incense smoke descended from the moon—

—and my heart, as uncertainly bound to the notion of the rest of what I call me as it is for all of us, recoils wondering how they could survive as long as some, not all, of them did through the supplice so methodically organized by the country they’d loved, because it shouldn’t be in our fragile, impermanent nature to withstand that, not for dignity nor for some other abstraction as small as an idea, but then inevitably understands that the unsurpassable, overwhelming atrociousness of it is how easily we attain and I’m sure sometimes even rejoice in the willingness and power to hurt another traveller through all of this, and I guess any slope gets slippery or always is and we like to relinquish control to our slopes and the hollering demons who blanket them in ice, don’t we, and could it be possible that all of us bear scars but some burn candles at both ends struggling to conceal them, because Christ spoke of how we need to love one another and we heard hide and cause pain from and to another since that’s always been the one we understood better, and this is some of what remains with me until my neurons depolarize forever inside this particular temporary structure only to be rebuilt in another someday and most of us probably have a thing or more very much like these that we carry as we would a compass wherever we go, whether we stroll through the valley of a river born from a glacier on a lovely Saturday inundated with all-embracing northern sunlight in *amiskwaciy-wâskahikan or not